Mahfouz Ould al-Walid

Mahfouz Ould al-Walid (1975-) was a Mauritanian Islamic scholar and poet who sat on the shura council of al-Qaeda and headed its sharia committee.

Biography
Mahfouz Ould al-Walid was born in Mauritania in 1975, and he joined the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. After the war, he ran the Institute of Islamic Studies in Kandahar, and he became a renowned Salafist scholar, as well as a member of al-Qaeda. al-Walid occupied high positions within the organizations, serving on its shura council, as the head of its sharia committee, and as its Mufti. In 1998, al-Walid sought to travel to Iraq, but Saddam Hussein denied him entry, refusing to allow for him to create problems in his country. Later that year, the United States aborted a plan to kill him while he was in Khartoum, Sudan, as he had left before they could take action against him. In mid-2000, future 9/11 hijacker Ahmed al-Nami approached al-Walid about becoming a suicide operative. In the months before the 9/11 attacks of 2001, al-Walid, Saeed al-Masri, and Saif al-Adel opposed the attacks, and al-Walid quoted the Quran in a stern letter of warning to Osama Bin Laden regarding his plans for a large-scale attack on the USA. al-Walid fled to Iran during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and was held under house arrest from 2003 to 2012, and, that year, he was extradited to Mauritania. He was released in 2012 after renouncing his ties to al-Qaeda and condemning the 9/11 attacks.